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Uncertain Exit Polls

This week’s reaction paper is on the reading of Polls and Predicting Elections, by Erikson and Tedin. The first part of our readings this week discussed polls and how they can predict the outcomes of elections. Undecided voters get the most heat from media and peers, because they want the undecided to lean toward their candidate. The undecideds as Erikson and Tedin call them are the voters who are uncertain on whom to vote for prior to Election Day. The next step of this process is determining the accuracy of the polls.
The polls are actually pretty accurate. The early polls in the beginning of the election are sometimes misleading. There are just some things that a pollster cannot account for, and this is why there are faults in the polls predictability. Other polls are hard to predict because they are so “volatile.” These primary elections are so volatile and unpredictable because there is a lot at stake for each candidate and no one wants to lose, so there are a lot of people who are undecided until the last minute of the election.
There are several different kinds of polls, when talking about politics and mass media. There are the national polls, which are the polls I think of when thinking about polls. These polls are the major elections across the nation and are usually fairly important. Other important election polls are for governors and US Senators. Although these polls do not get as much attention as other national polls, most of them are still accurate and reliable. An example of their reliability can be seen from the 2002 midterm election. “Of the 159 state polls for governor and US Senator conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign, the average margin of error was a mere 2.4 percentage points.” (Erikson-51) This corresponds to the number of polls that were actually predicted accurately. The polls in the midterm election in 2002 only got seven wrong out of 57 election polls.
This reading also talks about the exit polls on election days. An exit poll is when someone asks who you voted for right after you get done voting. Specific information like age, race, and income about the voter is not recorded. Mass media is supposed to be able to get a close count and predict what the turnout will be on the day of the election. Exit polls have not been looked at the same since the 2000 Presidential Election. According to the exit polls on that day, Al Gore was the winner and because this was not true apparently, exit polls have since been somewhat controversial.
This was not the first time exit polls have caused controversy. Exit polls can be misleading, especially if the polls in that state have not been closed yet. Because they can be misleading at times, exit poll representatives are urged to not release the information until the voting booths are closed. In order to fix this problem, congress has had several hearings to make exit polling more reliable and less misleading. Some rules or regulations that congress has been working on are, having the voting take place at the same time in every state, and how close the exit poll representatives can actually get to the polling booths.